In recent years, there has been tremendous growth in “cloud-hosted” computing and services, which are typically facilitated through large data centers. Examples of cloud-hosted services include AMAZON Web Services (AWS™) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), MICROSOFT Azure™ and Office 365™, APPLE iCloud™, various GOOGLE services (e.g., Google Docs™), and online e-mail services such MICROSOFT Hotmail™ (now Outlook Online™), YAHOO mail, and GOOGLE Gmail™, as well as a plethora of small e-mail services. In addition, many eCommerce sites are hosted on third-party operated data centers (e.g., AWS hosts a large number of eCommerce sites, in addition to Amazon.com itself). Streaming media services such as those provided by NETFLIX and YOUTUBE are also hosted by large data centers. Continued exponential growth of cloud-hosted services is expected for the foreseeable future.
Common criteria for data center hardware include flexibility and ease of install and configuration. For example, much of today's data center compute resources (e.g., rack and blade servers) are virtualized, enabling rapid deployment and migration of services, as well as reducing services (and their host hardware energy consumption) during periods of low utilization. It is also preferable that servers and the like be easily configurable. For instance, it is common to have “plug-and-play” (PnP) support for various add-on cards and peripherals, such as network cards and network interface controllers (NICs). Under plug-and-play, a PnP card or peripheral can be automatically configured (or otherwise configured with relative ease).
Recently, members of the Open Compute Project (OCP) has published specifications defining the use of OCP mezzanine cards in OCP Open Rack and other types of servers (available at http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/SpecsAndDesigns) One of the OCP specifications defines a mezzanine form factor for NIC cards. The specification defines support for mezzanine NIC cards with multiple ports and various types of Physical interfaces (PHYs).